No Chinese baby-boom

Professor Wang says he is not expecting an explosion of births once the policy is phased out.

He says the One Child Policy has not been the main reason behind falling fertility rates in China for some years now.

The Chinese Government's says the policy has stopped 400 million people being added to the population in the last 30 years.

Professor Wang says the policy has prevented only 100 million births and he attributes the rest of the slowdown to global trends.

"If you look at the world as a whole, developing countries in the last 50 years dropped from six births per woman to just over two." he said

"So China is not that much different from what has happened in other countries and to use this 400 million number as a way to continue to justify China's One Child Policy, it's very lame."

"This is not a policy that anybody wants to apply to themselves and I think the interesting part is going to be that people actually don't care. They would like to have their rights back but fertility will continue to be low in China." he said

The policy faces regular criticism on human rights grounds for preventing people from determining the size of their own families.

And despite laws against enforced abortions or sterilisations there are reported cases of local government officials making mothers exceeding the one-child limit submit to such procedures.=

Births below replacement level

Professor Wang says China's birth rate is currently around half-a-percent per year.

That is just a fifth of what it was 40 years ago and he expects it to drop to zero within the next decade.

However, he says other figures are more important when considering long term population trends.

"The number of children couples have on average ... that drives the long term trend of population change and that number has been very low. It's about 1.5 children per couple: 25 percent below what's needed to maintain the population size." he said.

This trend is starting to become a problem for the Chinese Government.

Last year, for the first time, China's labour force shrank slightly.

Experts believe the labour pool will continue to drain for the next 20 years, with big implications for the world's second-largest economy.

Professor Wang disputes how much of an ongoing impact the One-Child Policy is having on China's population growth.

He also says the government may be forced to move towards a pro-natal policy.

The United States and the UN are both predicting a sharp drop in China's population between 2030 and 2050.

"I would not be surprised if that would be the case within five years." he said